Bernard Schopen was born in 1942 in Deadwood, South Dakota. He earned bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees at the University of Washington, and completed his PhD in English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he has taught since 1990. Schopen is truly a western writer. His books deal with California novelist Ross Macdonald, or the various landscapes of Nevada—the setting for his three detective novels—which center on their narrator-protagonist, Jack Ross.